New Delhi, July 7 -- The two budg speeches, delivered nearly ha a-century apart, make for study in both similarities an contrasts. The first was b Indira Gandhi,I who held th finance portfolio for about year when she was prime minis ter and presented the 1970-7 budget. The second was by Nir mala Sitharaman who unveiled the.2019-20 fiscal; package a India's first full woman finance minister.
The two budgets also illustrate how far the economy has come from the 1970s, when India was in a semi-socialist cocoon, insulated from the rest of the world by self-imposed, Communist-style economic controls.
Gandhi's speech chided smokers for their "devotion to smoking" and proposed to increase tax on tobacco products, made several self-deprecating di...